This is My Thing An excerpt from “We Are the Luckiest” by Laura McKowen Before Laura McKowen got sober, she had a long, successful career in public relations in the Mad Men-esque drinking culture of the advertising industry, where “liquid lunches were frequent and drinking at your desk in the late afternoon was perfectly normal.” In the five years since she stopped drinking, she has become one of the foremost voices in the modern recovery movement. In her new memoir “We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Lif’e (New World Library, January 7, 2020), McKowen flips the script on how we talk about addiction and encourages readers not to ask, “Is this bad enough that I have to change?” but rather, “Is this good enough for me to stay the same?”
We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.
I
knew drinking was going to be my thing long before the night of our mom’s sixtieth birthday party, even if I refused to let that knowing arrive fully into my consciousness. I knew it in college when one of my guy friends, while retelling a story from a crazy party we’d been at the night before, joked that I probably wouldn’t remember — because I was always too drunk to remember — and I felt like crawling into a hole and dying. I knew it in my twenties, living in Boston, when my girlfriends continually joked about whose turn it was to take care of me, before we went out to the bars. I knew it by the urgency I felt chugging champagne before my wedding, and I knew it later, after my husband and I learned I was pregnant. I drank the occasional glass here and there throughout my pregnancy — sometimes pushing the limit from one to one and a half glasses — but aside from the wine not feeling good physically, I realized how much I relied on it to soften my experience. It was so incomplete to me, so unsatisfying, to have only one glass. To have a limit. Often in those pregnant months, I’d be going about my day
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Healing Springs I #107 I Spring ‘20
